A hot drink is the perfect thing to warm you up when the weather outside is frightful – even more delightful than a glowing fire, since a few sips will warm you up a lot faster! You can always make a mug of hot chocolate, or brew a pot of your favorite everyday coffee or tea, but the holidays are a time when you should indulge yourself a bit and celebrate with a drink that is a little more exciting!

The Cranberry Bliss White Chocolate Mocha has a great balance of sweet berries and creamy white chocolate that mirrors the flavors found in lots of holiday treats. Starbucks is selling this drink in Japan this season, but you can save yourself the flight and make it at home.

Peppermint Bark is a common holiday gift and you can turn a batch into a Peppermint Bark Mocha with ease. The drink will be sweet and have a nice minty undertone that is perfect for the season. Continue reading »

I have always enjoyed spending time in coffee shops, whether I’m visiting with friends, reading or doing a little work on my computer. Part of the reason I enjoy them is because being ni a coffee shop gives me very easy access to coffee. The other reason - and this might be because I spend so much time in coffee shops in the first place – is that I enjoy the general sounds of being in a coffee shop. It’s a mixture of people talking, milk steaming, espresso shots being pulled and coffee beans being ground. And it is a blend of sounds that I find very, very pleasant. There are plenty of times when I wish I were in a coffee shop instead of in an office next to any annoying coworking, or in my home office while my laundry is thumping around in the dryer, and lately I’ve been bringing coffee shop sounds into my home office to change the mood a bit and give me some familiar “white noise” to work to.

If you like the bustling atmosphere of a coffee shop and don’t feel like trekking out to your favorite location – perhaps the weather is too awful outside or you just don’t feel like changing out of your pajamas – try playing the above video while you work. It’s got 1 hour of coffee shop sounds that you can play any time. It’s not the only one on YouTube, so you can search around for something that sounds even more like your local favorite shop, but it’s a great one to start out with and I find that one hour of relaxing coffee sounds are all I need to kick start my work day. That, and a cup of coffee.

As more people do their shopping online, brick and mortar retailers often feel the pinch. We usually picture clothing stores and toy stores, but this kind of shift in shopping behavior also affects other types of stores, including the food and drink vendors in malls and shopping centers. Starbucks is just one example of a store that has seen a dip in some in-store sales over past holiday seasons – after all, commuters may not be stopping in for their morning coffee drink, either! – but this year, they are introducing a promotion that just might turn that trend around. Starbucks will be giving away free drinks for life to 10 lucky customers who use their registered Starbucks card between December 2nd and Christmas. Winning the promotion would entitle you to a free drink of your choice (I assume that you could select a different one every day) every day for the next 30 years. They’ll also be giving away other prizes for participating consumers.

The odds may be slim, but that is a pretty tempting prize for a coffee (or tea, especially since they’re incorporating more Tevana products) lover this holiday season. I’ll most likely be stopping by anyway, but it is a good excuse to get out of the house for a bit after doing the rest of your holiday shopping online.

Have you ever noticed that a cup of coffee can affect people very differently? You might be able to drink a few cups of your favorite roast and take a nap an hour later without a second thought, while your close friend might get the jitters after just half a cup. You might have chalked this up to caffeine tolerance – after all, caffeine is a drug – but it might be deeper than that. A new studypublished in the journal Molecular Psychiatry found that genetic variants explain why same amount of coffee can have different effects in different people.

Researchers from the Harvard School of Public Health and Brigham and Women’s Hospital studied over 120,000 coffee drinkers and found six genetic variants linked to coffee. Two are thought to play a role in the positive effects of caffeine, the happy stimulant effect that you get from your first cup, while others had impacts on glucose and fat metabolism, blood pressure regulation and addiction (to caffeine, for the purposes of this study). For instance, regular coffee drinkers were less likely to have high blood pressure than those who did not drink coffee. The study is interesting in part because it focused specifically on coffee and the caffeine in coffee, not just caffeine from general sources, and the fact that they identified links to coffee specifically help to explain why so many other studies have found health benefits related directly to coffee consumption.